FriedClams

We use 2 man crews a lot, especially when we get new operators. Some just need local area rules orientation, others are a multiple session mentoring program.
Those commodity trains were usually the fastest freight trains on a railroad, since the feeding/resting/icing rules were hard and fast for properly handling these freight classes. Milk trains were another type, but may be run as a passenger train, since they may have a coach tacked on .
Cows could ride up to 28 hours; then they needed 8 hours outside the cars while those cars were cleaned and re-bedded. Most produce and meats needed ice, but the shipper specified what type and the timing.
Some veggies, like potatoes, needed to be kept to a specific temperature range, so instead of ice they could put charcoal heaters in the ice bunker during the winter. 

This actually has a connection to Rocheport. Readers will good memories may recall that the huge warehouse behind the grain elevator was a massive hay barn used for feeding livestock being shipped on the Katy. 

To add to what Ken said (thanks!), some model railroads will operate with two-person crews per train, to better simulate the engine crew / conductor dynamic. One person actually operates the locomotive, the other handles the paperwork and is in charge. This has several advantages: it lets more people take part if you have a lot of interested operators, it's more realistic in terms of recreating the teamwork necessary to actually operate a train, and it divides up the work as one operator juggling a throttle and paperwork and timetable and uncoupling and turnout operation and everything can actually be too much for one person (just like on the real thing).
 
The whole blocking question is fun because it's a good example of how different model railroaders approach the hobby. In some cases people intentionally change things to make the work "harder" because, as a hobby, it's more interesting that way. So an unblocked train arriving in Rocheport would be an annoyance on the real thing, whereas on the model layout it's potentially a perk if the operator enjoys switching puzzles. Track plans are another example. In real-life Rocheport, as elsewhere on the Katy in this era, almost all sidings were double-ended (a turnout at each end) to make switching easier. But I took out the east-end turnout on my layout to make that a long one-ended siding, because that's more interesting to operate from a model perspective. If both ends had turnouts the work in Rocheport would be over too fast! It also saved some space that I wanted for more scenery.

Very good explanation, Eric. Proper "blocking" is the key to this location's switching activity. Eric touched on that in his write-up. Blocking is the arranging of cars in their switching order before arrival in town. Sometimes a good yardmaster will do that before departure, sometimes the train crew will do that along the way, with permission of the railroad dispatcher. The telegraph was introduced on the railroads in the 1850s. The Erie issued train orders back then
 
Waybills were generated by freight agents of the railroad and went to regional offices of the railroad. Copies went to the home office for billing and others went to the originating yard. The railroads employed a lot of clerks to process the waybills and carbon paper ruled. Copies of the waybills travel with the conductor in the caboose. He'll make up switch lists for the engine crew and brakemen, to use while actually switching the cars. 
 
All the paperwork can become a nightmare, that no model railroader wants to duplicate.  We just generate waybills to get cars on and off the layout. On bigger layouts, the cars may have to stop in several locations to have work done. Livestock, produce and meat products had special rules for feeding and resting animals.Refrigerator cars needed icing base on shipper requirements.  Don't forget, railroads hauled many different items from our earlier industries. Sears, Roebuck was Amazon until probably the 1960s in the US. All the goodies in the old Sears catalog went by rail. They shipped everything up to kit build houses. Mail was treated the same in special Railway Post Office cars. Mail got sorted enroute.  The railroads were wide-ranging across the US.

My guess would be by word of mouth. Cattle herd seen heading to such and such a place or a particular crop seen ripening near a certain community. Station agents probably gambled a lot on district knowledge and by keeping a close ear to the ground. I'm sure those station agents that were successful were duly compensated while those that weren't had to seek employment in other capacities like bank robbing and cattle rustling. 

Rik, great questions. Just to clarify, the waybills I'm using here aren't exactly what a real railroad used, they're simplified and adapted to a model railroad context. And while I designed this exact version, it's heavily drawing on a system developed long ago for model railroading by very smart people. What these model waybills do is allow a modeler to simulate the way a real railroad generated paperwork to direct how business was generated and moved over the railroad, whether or not "waybill" was used. And every railroad did things their own way. There are model railroaders who really strive for accuracy and duplicate the exact paperwork forms their prototypes used. I'm not quite at that level! But doing it this way gives you a more realistic feel than "let's put that car over there today". 
 
That being said, you are correct that good people were very important in this system! My understanding is that in this era, there would be a station agent at each depot whose general job was to deal with all the railroad's business, from generating business (e.g. "selling" transportation services to local businesses) to handling paperwork and orders to selling passenger tickets. Obviously with some staff in larger towns. By the 1900 era of this layout, the Katy had telegraph wires run along its route, so that facilitated communication. I honestly don't know how it worked pre-telegraph, other than slowly! In the layout-contemporary photo below, you can see a telegraph pole and wires on the river bank side of the tracks.
 

 
Most railroads were organized into "divisions" covering a certain distance (often roughly 100 miles in this era), and each division had its own central office, railroad crews, maintenance crews, etc. My understanding, though I'm not an expert in this, is that local station agents reported up to divisional offices, which handled the central paperwork to generate traffic on the railroad. So if I'm correct, the Rocheport station agent would submit reports and requests for shipments (or empty cars) up to the division office (in Franklin), where that information would be collated with all the other comparable info coming from all the other stops in the division. Basically the division office would develop a daily sense of all the traffic needed and being generated on their division, decided what they could handle on their own (e.g. are there empty cars within the division they can draw on) and then communicate with higher authority to coordinate additional traffic to and from the division. That's why there's a yard associated with the division office in Franklin, because that's where cars are picked up and dropped off from farther locations to be sorted and then delivered locally (or collected into blocks of outbound cars). Think of the division and its yard as a regional postal service center that sorts packages for local delivery or outward shipment, and station agents and their depots as local small-town post offices. Especially in the pre-truck era.
 
Beyond that my knowledge fades and I can only logically assume that there's a central office for the whole railroad that helps coordinate shipments, billing, etc. There are some other model railroaders in this thread and they may be able to correct or confirm what I've said here. My knowledge has been primarily gained in a  model railroad context, which tends to emphasize on-the-ground operations and not necessarily the full hierarchy of how that information is handled. In other words, model railroaders tend to focus on the role of engineers and conductors actually operating the trains, who are given a set of paperwork orders telling them what to do, which is what my waybills are. In the same way that model shipbuilders tend to focus on the construction and daily operations of a given ship, but less on the infrastructure and logistics it took to maintain a dockyard or coordinate naval movements throughout an entire service
 
Those aspects might well be interesting, but they're not essential to the model itself. In the same way, a waybill system like mine is essential to recreating reasonably realistic railroad movements in a local context, but aren't necessarily built on a complete reconstruction of the railroad's business structure. It's just understood that the business orders came from somewhere and our job is to enact those orders on a day-to-day basis on the ground.
 
Lastly, there are all sorts of levels of complexity in how model railroaders implement operations. What I'm doing here is a sort of middle ground. At the simplest level, some people eschew paperwork altogether and just use colored stickers or pins on the cars to make movements solely a simple visual puzzle, or they don't care for switching much at all and just run trains as a railfan. At the other end, there are computer programs that let you generate and track car movements layout wide, more like what a central office would do, and print out all sorts of customized instructions just like a central office presumably would. And again there are folks who duplicate all the real paperwork a real railroad used, including all sorts of extra details I'm not even beginning to address here. Just like in model shipbuilding, there are lots of rabbit holes to go down or lots of ways to keep things simple, as preference dictates.
 
Hope that long brain dump helped, and I hope other readers will correct anything I've mis-stated.

Eric,
 
Thank you for all that info....there is a lot going on.
 
I imagine the person (or office) that collected all the data to produce the Waybills was very important and crucial to smooth, efficient running of the railway. 
 
Some questions - How did that office communicate with other remote regional offices to know what deliveries to expect etc?  Or was there one central 'waybill office' per region?  Did Telegraph enable the first Waybill usage or were Waybills initially carried on the trains?
 
I think that a casual bystander like me only ever sees the tip of the iceberg regarding 'railways workings' - the same can be said of all professions I imagine.
 
So thank you for giving a very insightful look at what is happening below the surface. 
 
Richard

As it turns out, I've worked as an editor for many years and have written freelance for various outlets, so writing this wasn't overly burdensome! It's still a good feeling to contribute to the historical record.

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

OK, last week I promised a different explanation of how that operating session worked, so here's a graphical approach. We start with the Rocheport track diagram. There's one siding (1) with five places for freight cars to be set out for loading or unloading. [1] is a team track used for unloading anything from coal to wagons to lumber. [2] serves the grain elevator. [3] is the depot's freight house. [4] and [5] serve the stockyard.

How do we know where to set out cars? Here are two examples of waybills. There's one per freight car, and they slide into a pocket on the car card so that you can only see the top half (we'll get to the bottom half later).

The first one tells us we have a car headed to Rocheport, on consignment to a wagon dealer named W.W. Scobbee (a real Rocheport dealer at the time). See that "1-1" after the receiver's name? That tells us the car needs to be delivered to Rocheport's siding (1), spot [1], as shown on the diagram above. That's because this dealer doesn't have his own trackside warehouse, just receives individual shipments now and then. So this needs to go to the team track, where this fellow can pick up his new wagon.
 
The second one tells us that this car has shipments for two different general merchandise dealers (again, real Rocheport businesses), and this one goes to spot [3] at the depot, which handles crated items like these (hand tools, canned groceries, clothes, whatever). 
 
Both cards also tell us that the cars came from St. Louis' Baden Yard, brought to nearby Franklin yard by a through freight, where they were sorted onto the local freight that brought them to Rocheport for final delivery. So what happens when it's time to pick up these cars? Between operating sessions, we flip the waybills over in their car card pockets.

Notice how the first ones had a big 1 in the upper right corner? That tells us this waybill brings the car onto the layout to its destination. When we flip these over, we get a 2, which tells us that now we're in the second part of this car's movement, sending it back off-layout to some other destination. For example, if we'd loaded an empty boxcar with grain at the elevator, it might be destined for a mill in Chicago or St. Louis. In the cards above, both cars delivered a product on their first run, so they're now empty (MTY) and are being sent back. The merchandise boxcar at the depot goes back to an MK&T freight house in St. Louis, and the empty flatcar goes back to a yard in St. Louis until needed for some other job. In both cases, the local freight takes these back to nearby Franklin yard, where an eastbound through freight will pick them up and take them to St. Louis.
 
So each waybill creates a realistic set of shipping/movement directions for each car on the layout, lasting for two operating sessions. Now let's summarize how this worked in practice.
 
Thinking back to the photo essay in an earlier post, here's how we started. The diagram below shows each car with its number and location or destination. Grey cars are being picked up, white ones are arriving on the local freight currently sitting on the main line. So 65-2 is car #65 currently in spot [2], while 25-2 is car #25 that needs to be placed at spot [2]. 74-T and 49-T are through cars going to a different town; here they're just in the way!

Notice that the arriving cars are all out of order; sometimes the Franklin Yard operator should deal with that, but today it's our problem. So the first order of business is to re-sort these cars into the proper order for delivery. Right now they're in order 3,1,5,4,2 but we need to end up with 1,2,3,4,5 on the siding.
 
Below, we've taken the caboose and the two through cars and stuck them up on the passing siding as out of the way as we can get them, since we don't need them here.

Then our locomotive does various sorting to get these in delivery order on the passing siding. Notice something odd? 

Why are they in order 4,5,1,2,3? Well, that's another fun operating quirk. Local railroad rules (e.g. mine) say you can't pull past the tunnel when switching here. So there's only room for the locomotive to pull three cars at a time past that left-hand switch just to the right of the bridge. So we placed the 4,5 cars first, so we can pull them past the switch, shove them into the far end of the siding first, then place 1,2,3 behind them. Just another part of the puzzle that makes operating interesting.
 
So now all we have to do is pull all the departing (grey) cars from the siding, in two pulses because of the length limit, and stick them on the main line. Then we're free to deliver 4,5 and then 1,2,3 into the siding. Then we just stick 74, 49, and the caboose back on the end of our outbound cars, and our train is ready to depart for the next town.

I hope that made sense. Please ask questions if not. This is a fairly simplistic version of operations; it can be made far more complex if desired. For example, a real railroad would do everything it could to avoid carrying empty cars. So instead of sending empty cars all the way back to St. Louis, it would be looking for a chance to send them somewhere closer to be re-loaded with something else. There are ways to simulate this more complex approach and I might implement those later, but for now this simple approach still makes for interesting railroading.
 
The beauty of this approach is that it's highly flexible and customizable. I can create as many waybills as I want, setting up different car movements for different reasons, and keep swapping them out. I could have a given car need to stay in Rocheport for several days, getting in the way! Not all sites have to have a car picked up or dropped off every day. And I could even swap out one waybill for another between sessions. And all this is for just one town; if the layout expands, the same situation happens in other places, and once you add a larger yard like Franklin, a lot more sorting happens when you're actually dealing with all cars passing over the railroad, not just ones for a little dinky town like this.
 
I realize this may seem esoteric to non-railroad-buffs. But think of it as a combination of historical re-enactment and mental/logic puzzle. Not only do you get to step back in time and experience live railroading in a given era, but you get a really fun mental challenge if you're the puzzle-solving type. My wife, who's a mild railfan, actually really enjoys these little operating sessions because she's a data scientist who gets easily drawn into logical puzzle solving. The railroad experience is just a bonus.
 
Thanks for reading (or skimming?) all that. Soonish I'll have more actual modeling to show, as I'm working on various buildings.
 
 
 
 

Fun news! I'm a member of the Katy Railroad Historical Society, which publishes a quarterly newsletter covering the railroad's history and various modeling projects related to it. The September 2025 issue publishes an article I wrote about the Peerless modeling project and its connection to the railroad. The newsletter is print-only, but they graciously sent me a PDF copy of the article with permission to distribute to people I know who aren't KRHS members (specifically including MSW members).
 
If you're interested in reading the article, send me a private message through MSW with your email address, and I'll send you the PDF. Here's a screenshot of the first page to whet your appetite. Also cross-posting this on my build log for the Peerless.
 
To send a private message on MSW, click a user's name to go to their profile, then look for the "message" button to the right of their username on the banner of that profile page.

Hi Keith, I usually buy basswood from Sunward Hobbies in Toronto. They sell Bud Nosen Models wood who are in Two Harbors Minnesota. At the moment Sunward has BNM in stock

I have a small drum thickness sander to thin down the wood to 1/32.   The laser has no issues cutting 1/32 inch sheets.    Xacto knifes and micro planes cut through this stuff like butter.
 
 

Hi Bill, thank you very much.. I’m not cutting my own strips. All of the AYC came from Joe at Modeler’s Sawmill . I have no idea how people cut these small strips as I’m having a hard enough time using them. Joe’s wood and service are first rate.

The precision in your work is outstanding, Paul.

Hi Keith, thank you. The hinges were made from 26 gauge wire. The paint was burned off and and then it was bent into an L shape. The long end was pushed through the hole and bent over. It was glued with E6000 glue to keep it from turning. I didn't like the way they looked. They were all different colors so I gave the whole wall another light coat of paint. The door knobs are steel pins with the heads reduced in size and then heated red hot. they came out a grey color. As usual by the time I do the last one I'll have it figured out
 

Great detail on the cabins, Paul. How did you replicate the forward cabin door hinges?

Hi Jacques, thank you very much. The walkway along the sides of the cabins will be planked. There is only about two feet between the cabin wall and the stanchions that support the boat deck. The cabin doors are 22.5” wide so not a lot of room. There is also a trough for the steering cable to lay in that runs just inboard of the stanchions. The rails are wire rope that runs through the stanchions. I guess they wanted every inch they could get for cargo

Amazing work! Designing the upper level to slot into the lower one is a great way to keep everything lined up, and the precision throughout is really impressive. Out of curiosity, will there be any more planking along the side of the upper level, or is there just a narrow walkway there?

Hi Everyone, hope you are all well. Thank you for the Comments and Likes. I've been working on the cabins on the cabin deck. The frames that will be the finished opening for the windows were made from 1/16"x 1/8"  and 1/32"x 3/16" AYC  with the latter ending up being proud of the 1/16" plywood by about 1/16"
 

 
 

 
The doors were then laid out with the stiles being 1/32"x 1/16" . The bottom rail is 1/32"x 5/64" and the rest of the rails are 1/32"x 1/16".
 

 
 

 
The siding could now be applied and I started laying out the Aft cabins to get a rest from the siding.
 

 
The forward and aft walls were made so that they could be dry fitted to keep things square
 

 
Then came more siding. It is all 1/32"x 5/64".
 

 
 

 
Once the walls were sanded the 1/32"x 1/32" boxwood window sashes were installed. Two pieces of 1/16" plastic were cut and placed into the the opening to keep the sashes about 1/32" back from the face of the siding while thinned white PVA was applied with a micro brush.  When dry, the plastic was removed and the inside was glued.
 

 
 

 
A couple of partitions were made to keep the side walls straight
 

 
The two end walls were glued to the side walls while in place. When they were dry the partitions were glued to the side walls
 

 
 

 
The structure was removed and the forward wall was sided
 

 
 

 
Some paint and then the forward cabins were dry fitted back in place. Going to wait before gluing just in case they have to be removed again
 

 
 

 
The aft cabins are underway. Hope to see you soon.

For some strange reason I keep holding off on the boat davits... probably because I know I will knock them off the model more than once unless they are last to go on!
With that in mind I made the life rings next, St. Roch mounted four around her deck house. I started with plastic rings from New Cap Maquettes. They are the right size and cross section, but they come with plastic lines molded on around the ring. These were the first things I cut off, resulting in the picture below:

Next I trimmed up the molded seam lines, and painted the rope rings black. Then I used my miniature drill to make holes through the rope rings, and began stringing hemp lines around the perimeters.

Here are the four rings complete and looking much better than when I started... Again I used 'No Sew' at each rope ring to hold the line. It dries clear and flexible, and will allow me to make minor adjustments to the ropes once it has set up. 

Next I need to add the name decal to each life ring, and make the brackets that mount on the ship to hold the rings...

And here they are done, didn't take much time at all. 
The first picture shows the shaped rails off the ship for painting. I never try painting anything so fussy on the ship where the paint will get everywhere it shouldn't!

After painting they popped right back into their holes...
Et Voila! Done!

Getting into the last of the hull details now. Davits and life rings to come, then lastly the decals!
I'm starting the masts by marking the various locations for the bands and other fittings... stay tuned for more fun and games!
Regards,
Bruce
 

Bruce, the next time you make railings that will be white consider using solid core white craft wire. On my Tennessee  I ran white craft wire through the brass stanchions and left the stanchions unpainted, it's not a bad look IMHO. I have a horrible time using white paint especially on wire because it always seems to come out looking lumpy. White craft wire for railings turns out looking clean and crisp.  
 
 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=white+craft+wire&i=arts-crafts&crid=5XE1STNTQWVO&sprefix=white+craft+wire%2Carts-crafts%2C130&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

In between fussing with davit blocks I made good progress on the poop deck railings...
The port rail is painted and installed, the starboard and stern rails so the CA can set up and fix the assembly. Then they will come off the ship for painting...



Lots of fun! Thanks for looking in!
Bruce
 
 

Cover looks fantastic!